by Mackenzi Lee
As promised, she draws the sketch upon my skin in charcoal first—no partying phalluses, just the faint outline of the Crown and Cleaver on my forearm—then picks up her instrument. She’s wrapped needles from the ship’s surgical kit together with string to create a tiny, many-toothed nib. It’s certainly not the dodgiest tool that has been used to put a permanent mark on a person’s skin, but still far from the sort of instrument that would have been approved for use by the governors of Saint Bart’s.
But I’m rather finished with wondering what those men would think.
Sim dips it into the black ink, then takes my forearm in her hand. A flock of terns launches from the sea and into flight, a wild burst for the sky that speckles shadows across our faces.
“Am I shaking?” I ask.
“Not a bit.”
“I don’t want to look!” Johanna cries, though she makes no move to cover her eyes or even close them. Sim’s thumb floats over the soft skin of my forearm, stretching it tight, then she leans down and deals a quick kiss to the spot. “For luck,” she says.
As she raises the needle, I look between her and Jo-hanna. In the company of women like this—sharp-edged as raw diamonds but with soft hands and hearts, not strong in spite of anything but powerful because of everything—I feel invincible. Every chink and rut and battering wind has made us tough and brave and impossible to strike down. We are mountains—or perhaps temples, with foundations that could outlast time itself.
When the needle breaks my skin, the pain is as cold and bright as the horizon of a cloudless winter sky. In this moment, this place, this perch upon the edge of the world, it feels like the view goes on forever.
Dear Callum,
I’ve been staring at this page for an hour at least and that’s all I’ve written. Dear Callum.
Dear Callum,
I’m not sure how I have so much to say and no words to be found. Also pardon the blood—it’s only a small drop, and it’s mine, and it’s only from having a pirate symbol carved upon my arm.
Drat. All that contemplation for such a poor beginning.
How I should have started was with I’m sorry, for I intend for this to be an apology letter to the both of us.
First to you, for taking advantage of your kindness and your fondness. I hope you aren’t sorry for that kindness, and I hope you do not falter the next time you feel the urge to give a cream puff to someone in need, simply because I burned you.
Second, an apology to me, for trying to force my heart somewhere it didn’t belong, and for thinking myself odd because it didn’t fit there. And then again to you for also thinking myself odd in the way of a wildflower, brilliant and rare and better for that rarity, and you too common a blossom for my garden. I’m sorry I looked down upon your life.
I’m sorry that you thought you had to save me from myself. Sorry more that we live in a world that raised you to think that way. I used to wish terribly that I wanted a bakery and a baker and a brood. I used to wish that was all I needed to feel complete. How much simpler life would be. But nothing is simple, not a life in a bakeshop in Scotland nor one exploring the world’s untouched trenches. And thank God, because I do not want simple. I do not want easy or small or uncomplicated. I want my life to be messy and ugly and wicked and wild, and I want to feel it all. All those things that women are made to believe they are strange for harboring in their hearts. And I want to surround myself with those same strange, wicked women who throw themselves open to all the wondrous things this world has to offer.
Perhaps I’m spiraling into sentimental prose, but at this moment, I feel that I could swallow the world whole.
I hope you live a life you’re proud of. I really do. I hope someday we can sit down again over cider and pastries, and you can tell me your story and I can tell you mine and we will both burst like overripe fruit with pride in ourselves, and each other. I couldn’t be a baker’s wife, but someone will, and you’ll be good to her, and happy together, and as much as this new life is mine, that will be hers. I’m learning there is no one way for life to be lived, no one way to be strong or brave or kind or good. Rather there are many people doing the best they can with the heart they are given and the hand they are dealt. Our best is all we can do, and all we can hold on to is each other.
And, zounds, that is more than enough.
Yours,
Felicity Montague
Author’s Note
Women in historical fiction are often criticized for being girls of today dropped into historical set pieces, inaccurate to their time because of their feminist ideas and independent natures. It’s a criticism that has always frustrated me, for it proposes the idea that women throughout time would not see, speak out, or take action against the inequality and injustices they faced simply because they’d never known anything else. Gender equality and the treatment of women is not a linear progression; it has varied throughout time and is dependent upon a slew of factors, like class, race, sexuality, location, religion, etc., etc., etc. We tend to think of history as less individual than we do our modern experiences, but most general statements about all women in any historical context can be proven false. By exceptions, not rules, of course. But still disproved. Just as there is no single story for women today, there is not one for historical women either.
Here, I will address the three women in the novel and their respective aspirations, as well as the research and real-life women of history that inspired each of them.
Medicine
It is indisputable that medicine in eighteenth-century England was dominated by men. They were not all educated—medical care ranged from barbers who would shave your face, pull your teeth, and perform surgery all with the same tools to professional, educated surgeons whose services were usually only available to the wealthy (and whose ranks were generally made up of those already born into wealth). At the time, there were only a handful of universities offering medical degrees, so a surgical education was often gained from lectures, courses, and dissections sponsored by hospitals or private physicians. A prospective doctor would have to sit an exam before receiving his license, though many unlicensed doctors still operated around the country.
Women were restricted to certain corners of the medical field, like herbal remedies and midwifery, though the growing trend of male midwives, as well as the development of and subsequent monopoly on forceps by male surgeons, was boxing women out of that. However, the idea that women were excluded from all medicine—or, really, all “men’s work”—is false. In many professions we now think of as traditionally male—including medicine—wives often worked alongside their husbands and, if the husband died or was unable to work, served as a “deputy husband,” meaning they took up their husband’s profession. Lady doctors were more accepted the farther you got from big cities and big hospitals and their regulating boards.
Felicity, a woman who wants to be educated and taken seriously in the sciences, would by no means have been ahead of her time. At the same time the novel is set, Laura Bassi received a doctoral degree in physics from the University of Bologna after defending her thesis at age twenty, and went on to a professorship—the first woman to earn a university chair in a scientific field. In Germany, Dorothea Erxleben, inspired by Bassi, was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in medicine and, in 1742, published a tract arguing that women should be allowed at universities.
Things moved slower in the United Kingdom—it would be one hundred years after Felicity before medical schools welcomed women into their student bodies. (And welcomed is far too generous a word.) The gender barrier was finally broken in 1869, thanks to the consistent efforts of countless women who fought without ever seeing the product of their struggle, but who paved the way for the Edinburgh Seven, the first group of matriculated undergraduate female students at a British university: Sophia Jex-Blake, Isabel Thorne, Edith Pechey, Matilda Chaplin, Helen Evans, Mary Anderson, and Emily Bovell.
But even after they were granted admission, they were educated separately from their
male counterparts. Their tuition was higher. Male students harassed them physically and verbally. When the Seven arrived to sit an anatomy exam, they were met with a mob who threw mud and rocks at them. And even after they’d completed their coursework and exams, the university refused to grant them degrees.
But as more women joined their ranks, they formed a General Committee for Securing a Complete Medical Education for Women, which helped pass the Medical Act of 1876, which allowed licenses to be granted to both men and women. Jex-Blake, the leader of the Seven, helped establish the London School of Medicine for Women and eventually returned to Edinburgh as the city’s first woman doctor. The epigraph of this book is a quote from her biography. Go ahead and flip back to it. I’ll wait.
The medical texts, practitioners, and treatments that Felicity references throughout this book are all real and all products of the eighteenth century, but I played fast and loose with their timeline. Some of the writings she mentions would not have been published at the same time the book is set, and several doctors mentioned would have technically come after her, but I chose to include them to create a more rounded picture of the weirdness that was medicine in the 1700s.
Naturalism
The eighteenth century was the age of enlightenment. Most of the world’s major landmasses had been discovered, but thanks to technological advancements, many locations were being mapped for the first time. Scientific missions, commissioned and funded by kings, governments, and private collectors, were focused on creating these maps, as well as bringing new flora and fauna back to Europe. Fields like natural history, botany, zoology, geography, and oceanography expanded. These voyages of discovery almost always included artists, who were used to record the landscapes and natural wonders. Before photography, artists were critical to capturing precise details of nature so that they could be compared and analyzed.
Johanna Hoffman and Sybille Glass were inspired by Maria Sibylla Merian, a German naturalist and scientific illustrator whose work spanned the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century. Like Sybille Glass, Maria Merian separated from her husband and was hired as an artist on a scientific expedition to Suriname. She spent two years in South America, accompanied by her daughter Dorothea. Later, the two women ran a business together selling prints of Maria’s scientific illustrations. Today, Maria’s work is considered to be among the most important contributions to modern entomology.
Naturalism and medicine were closely related fields to eighteenth-century scholars. Physicians joined expeditions, not only to administer first aid to the crew as needed but to conduct their own research and collect samples of natural medicines for further study. Experiments, procedures, and dissections were often performed on animals (both dead and alive, because history is the worst). Many physicians believed that facts learned from these animal experiments could also be applied to the understanding of the human body—false, but good hustle, eighteenth century.
Piracy
The pirates of the eighteenth-century Mediterranean were not the white, roguish swashbucklers that populate most of our best-known modern buccaneer narratives. They were mostly African men and women from the Barbary States who worked to expand and protect their own territories and fleets. They defended themselves from and fought against both other pirates and Europeans. The slave trade was alive and well in the 1700s—Europeans enslaved Africans, and Africans enslaved other Africans. However, of all the liberties taken for the sake of an adventure-novel plot, I have to cough up to one in particular: pirates were no great fans of tattoos, as it was a far too obvious and permanent way to declare your allegiances.
Within every pirate fleet, there was often a complex internal organization that included electing officers and leaders, dividing plunder, and maintaining social order. Much of this order was kept in balance by pirates marrying each other. Not all marriages had romantic components—some were only to determine who would inherit what if someone died in battle—but many marriage contracts that have survived do include clauses about intimacy. Sailors have long been practitioners of “situational homosexuality” as a result of long months at sea without sexual release, but for pirates, these relationships could be open and legitimate. The term for these unions was matelotage, which was eventually shorted to mate, and then matey. Sim, as a Muslim girl, likely would not have been kissing anyone, but views of homosexuality, particularly relationships between women, were as complex and variable as they are today.
Sim was initially inspired by Sayyida al-Hurra, the sixteenth-century Muslim woman who used her position as governor of Tétouan to command a fleet of pirates that conducted raids on Spanish ships as revenge for the genocide and exile of Muslims, though her character and story line evolved considerably over the course of writing this novel. And while women at sea were outnumbered by men in the Barbary States, Sim is part of a long, rich heritage of women at the head of pirate fleets, including Ching Shih, Jeanne de Clisson, Grace O’Malley, Jacquotte Delahaye, Anne Dieu-le-Veut, Charlotte de Berry—they could fill an entire book (and have! Have you read Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers Who Ruled the Seven Seas by Laura Sook Duncombe? It’s rad).
There are many things that make this book fiction, but the roles women play within it are not. The women of the eighteenth century were met with opposition. They had to fight endlessly. Their work was silenced, their contributions ignored, and many of their stories are forgotten today.
Nevertheless, they persisted.
About the Author
Courtesy Mackenzi Lee
MACKENZI LEE holds a BA in history and an MFA from Simmons College in writing for children and young adults. Her short fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Atlas Obscura, the Boston Globe, Crixeo, and the Newport Review, among others. Her debut novel, This Monstrous Thing, won the PEN New England–Susan P. Bloom Children’s Book Discovery Award. Her second book, The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, was a New York Times bestseller and an ABA bestseller, earned five starred reviews, was a #1 Indie Next Pick, and received a 2018 Stonewall Book Award Honor and a New England Book Award. She loves Diet Coke, sweater weather, and Star Wars. On a perfect day, she can be found enjoying all three. She currently calls Boston home, where she works as an independent bookstore manager and pets every dog she meets.
www.mackenzilee.com
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Books by Mackenzi Lee
This Monstrous Thing
The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue
The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy
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Copyright
Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE LADY’S GUIDE TO PETTICOATS AND PIRACY. Copyright © 2018 by Mackenzie Van Engelenhoven. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.epicreads.com
Cover photographs by Michael Frost Photography
Photo composite by Travis Commeau
Cover design by David Curtis
Map by David Curtis
* * *
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018933261
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2018 ISBN:
978-0-06-279534-2
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-279532-8
* * *
1819202122PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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